Switzerland has trains too and that it is very famously very much not flat, has the same GDP per capita as California. While the population in Switzerland is nearly twice the Californian density on average, the SF-LA corridor contains two absurdly dense metropolitan areas, with a total population nearly double the entire country of Switzerland, so the average density where it matters for this route is high. In fact California is almost perfectly designed for a rail backbone, as nearly everyone lives on one line from San Diego, through LA to San Francisco and there's a 300 mile plain in the middle so it's not mountains all the way.
Yes, you need some enormous tunnels. That's more than possible, ask the Swiss or Norwegians. And yes, it's an earthquake zone, but it's still functionally a political problem.
Isn't some of this also network effects though? Having a Swiss train system has a lot more value because it connects to the German and French and Austrian train systems. You build a train line from LA to SF and it serves those cities, but if you want to go to Phoenix or Monterrey Mexico, you're in for a bad time.
Then connect it (actually it's already connected, it's just slow, the trains only go every few days and you change in Flagstaff and a bus is half the time and 1/3 the cost). Again, these are all fundamentally problems of "we just don't really want to" or "we really don't want to".
I'm not saying it's in any way practical reality because there's always a million reasons why It Just Can't Be Done. But that those million reasons are human choices, not physical laws of nature (other than the mountains, but it's 2024, not 1824, that can be done). It's just a chronic lack of intestinal fortitude.
It can be done, but it is very expensive. A 8 mi mountain railway tunnel like Wienerwald cost around $400m to build. That same amount could literally be spent to expand the Altamount Corridor Express railway (ACE) into downtown San Jose, thus having an impact in a closely integrated metropolitan area of 10m residents.
Why spend that (and much more) money integrating two cities that aren't even that closely tied from a commuting standpoiint.
Only 2.2 million people travel between Greater LA and the Bay Area annually, but 5.5 million travel between San Jose and San Francisco annually.
Clearly there is some demand for LA-SF connectivity, but it's hard to justify.
Defining it as "a human choice" is both clearly accurate and misses the point. Yes. It's obviously not physically impossible. But just ascribing it to "a chronic lack of intestinal fortitude" as if everyone involved is just too much of a sissy to blow a hole in a mountain like people used to is absurdly reductionist. It ignores the vast history of how much past US grand projects like the interstate and the railroads were built on the back of destroying the environment and often genocidally taking land from native Americans.
Yes, some of it is for dumb reasons, but there's also plenty of reasons that aren't just "we used to be a real country". It is, in fact, not 1824 any more. We can't just offer thousands of Chinese immigrants $2 a week and have half of them die while putting a hole in the Rocky Mountains. Yes, that's "a human choice", but the physical dimensions of the problem define the very real tradeoffs that have to be made. The "physical laws of nature" don't stop us from doing all sorts of things we'd probably regret, many of which we do regret now.
To go back to my original point, those reasons are a lot more compelling when you're spending some billions of dollars that connect to another country's billions of dollars of trains, and you get some regular amount of cross-traffic. Sure, we could build more, but we're not going to build a Deutsche Bahn amount of rail within Arizona. They're about the same geographic size, and Germany has 10x the population. Likely same with Nevada and Oregon. So what do you propose we connect to that has anywhere near the same network effect of cross-travel?
San Francisco to Los Angeles requires building rail lines in multiple mountain ranges that rival the Carpathians.
Imagine having to build a 600km high speed railway line through 3 mountain ranges the size and height of the Carpathians, oh and almost nobody lives in between the two metros.
We have railways across and through the alps. Look up the Brenner Base Tunnel or Gotthard Base Tunnel.
Somehow Europe builds those things even across national borders. To be fair, there's not really an alternative if one wants to connect southern and northern Europe.
> We have railways across and through the alps. Look up the Brenner Base Tunnel or Gotthard Base Tunnel.
Absolutely, and those were multibillion dollar projects that could be justified to help connect 4-5 different heavily populated regions - Vienna, Innsbruck, Veneto, and Milan.
In between the Bay Area and Los Angeles Metro there are only 2 metropolitan areas (Fresno, Bakersfield), and they have a combined population less than 20% of Veneto.
BUt that's my point. It's integrating two extremely dense regions with multiple large cities in between. Between the Bay Area and Greater Los Angeles, all you have is Fresno and Bakersfield.
When it comes to trains there is always people who talks about the geographical challenges of building tracks or whatever. I mean these are mostly fixed cost investments and we know exactly how to do them. Why is it such a big deal to build bridges and tunnels?
San Francisco to Los Angeles requires building rail lines in multiple mountain ranges that rival the Carpathians.
Imagine having to build a 600km high speed railway line through 3 mountain ranges the size and height of the Carpathians, oh and almost nobody lives in between the two metros.
Additionally, trying to buy any of the land in between, let alone get environmental damage clearances for building all those tunnels and bridges is probably borderline impossible. Most US rail was built in the era where we were actively taking the land by force and just demolishing nature in the pursuit of progress. It's not clear to me that we could build something like the highway system or a major new rail system in a way that wouldn't be massively detrimental to the environment or the communities along the routes without also making it insanely expensive/inefficient.
Yes, you need some enormous tunnels. That's more than possible, ask the Swiss or Norwegians. And yes, it's an earthquake zone, but it's still functionally a political problem.